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IGN Interview: Topic 2
In the interview, Dan Houser reveals the stories behind the making of Grand Theft Auto III and his personal experience of the controversies that followed At what point did you realise Grand Theft Auto III was going to be a really big deal? I think in late 2000, when we got the map up and running and the character moving around the map. Once that was there it was like, well, if we execute the rest of this correctly this could be amazing. You can't go in there thinking, "I want this to be the biggest game ever," which it pretty much was at the time, give or take. We would never need to please everyone, we just needed to please a bunch of people. Our expectations were not that it had to sell 15 million copies, it was that it had to do well. Our expectations were that we would make something that was really cool. It reviewed well, but not spectacularly. It got some great scores, but some very respectable magazines gave it six out of ten. Was it the bad reviews that stand out for you? Of course, always. We take it very seriously. We put a lot of effort into it and we're sort of paranoid, I think, because we didn't launch many copies at all. I think Metal Gear Solid 2 came out, and we were like, "Oh, that's it. we had a good run of three weeks at number one, but that's that. And then Metal Gear came out and it was a great game, but GTA had this crazy momentum behind it. Metal Gear was number one for a week and then GTA was back to being number one. It just kept this underground explosion where it was getting talked about more and more places. Through the end of January, February it was just constant excitement. I think at that point we realized that, okay, this game really has moved up a level. Rockstar could easily have put out GTA III as the top-down GTA people knew. Why did you decide to make the jump to 3D? We had so many limitations in what we could do in games on PS1. There was this enormous "graphics versus gameplay" debate on any decision. Our hope with PS2 was that would be less of a key debate. It seemed like the idea of a game that embodies freedom as the previous ones had, but with an additional sense of life and cinematic quality to it, could be something amazing. I think it was the right decision but it wasn't a decision that didn't have some opponents. Plenty of people thought we should never have moved out of 2D. Well, they were wrong. I would agree. In the case of GTA III, the challenge was making a 3D story, making the sound ''sound ''like it's in 3D, making the radios feel like they're in a 3D world. What we've always tried to do is make the games feel totally consistent across the whole experience. So the story and the graphics and the way people speak and what they talk about and the way the missions play, all feel like they're consistent within a game. They change between the games as we develop and get more complex between the games. But when we were moving the graphics over to 3D, everything else had to move to 3D as well. That creates vast numbers of problems we had not really thought about. You have all these people walking about, they need to speak. You've got to design a whole system for that, and then you've got to figure out a way to do what, at the time, seemed completely crazy: recording eight thousand voices or eight thousand lines of dialogue. You're talking about one year after the end of CD era games. It seemed insane. I mean now we're happily putting in a hundred thousand lines but in those days just the production of doing that kind of stuff... Okay, we'll pre-render cut scenes. Well, that's going to be silly because there's going to be a big load and it will look totally different than the game, so how else can you do the cut scenes? Maybe mocap can do it, but then you've never done that before, so you figure out ways of doing the motion capture cut scenes...what can we do? We've got to stream in the data off the disc. Can that work? Things like that that now are pretty standard. GTA III was the first, or one of the very first to ever do this. So many things about the game technically and design-wise had never been done before. When you made the jump to 3D, was there a discussion of "is this too real?" There were rampages and then there were these prostitutes... Did we think it was too violent? No. We put it out and we were proud of it. Were we conscious that some people might offended? Absolutely. We were very careful to make sure we never marketed it in a way that exploited that. There was no violence or content in it that you wouldn't see in a TV show and see in a movie. To us, it was like "well, this debate doesn't make sense," but we could sniff that it would probably come. We obviously never could have predicted that it would become as overblown as it did over the next four or five years. Ten years on, society may be in a bit of a mess right now but it definitely isn't video games' fault. The one thing you cannot argue empirically now is: In the last ten years there hasn't been a massive societal collapse based on these games. You know -- you spend tons of time not doing anything violent. There's far less violence in the game than in an average first-person shooter.